


A Semester at the Edge of Infinity

by DoctorSyntax



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Punk Scully
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:42:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24111511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoctorSyntax/pseuds/DoctorSyntax
Summary: He should have kissed her then. He thinks about it, sometimes, the way he could have bent her backwards over his arm like a tiny, pierced Ginger Rogers and kissed her soundly. She’d have punched him in the face, sure, but it would have been worth a black eye to see the slack-jawed shock on that Minette asshole’s face.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 2
Kudos: 52





	A Semester at the Edge of Infinity

**Author's Note:**

> Some of the dialogue has been directly lifted from episodes - mostly season 1, but there's a notable detour to Detour, also.

He should have kissed her the day they met—not the _moment_ they met, that would have been ridiculous—but a half-hour later, when their meeting with Dr. Skinner ended and they walked out together, riding down the elevator. She was rummaging in her falling-apart olive drab messenger bag, looking for God knows what, and he was trying desperately to think of a conversation starter that wasn’t _Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?_ when the doors slid open to reveal the lobby. With her head in the clouds of her bag, she’d walked straight into someone before Mulder could reach out to grab her by the back of her leather jacket.

“Sorry,” she started, and then looked up. “Oh! Ethan!”

“I figured I’d take you to lunch after your meeting,” the guy was saying. He was handsome in that boring, Abercrombie-and-Fitch kind of way, with gelled dark hair and an alligator stitched to the breast of his polo shirt. Mulder stepped off the elevator but didn’t leave right away, caught up analyzing the dichotomy of the situation for what must’ve been too long—Brooks Brothers caught his eye and tried to stare him down.

How very fifth-grade.

Dana, as she’d introduced herself in Skinner’s office, followed Ethan’s gaze over her shoulder to see Mulder. “Oh, Ethan, this is Fox Mulder, he’s the other TA for this section. Fox, this is my boyfriend, Ethan Minette.”

“Call me Mulder,” he corrected, shifting his weight to his other foot as he tried to decide if he should shake the guy’s hand.

Ethan’s upper lip curled a little. “Your reputation precedes you, Spooky. Careful, Danes, or before the semester’s up he’ll try recruiting you for his UFO club.” His arm went around Dana’s shoulder in a blatant show of possession.

It was so, so gratifying to see the way Dana shifted a little to dislodge Ethan’s arm—not to mention the mix of surprise and disapproval on her face.

“Actually,” she said after a moment, “he was just telling me about it and it sounds fascinating. I was looking forward to the first meeting.” She looked over at Mulder with a little smile that said _play along_ and…

And he should have kissed her then. He thinks about it, sometimes, the way he could have bent her backwards over his arm like a tiny, pierced Ginger Rogers and kissed her soundly. She’d have punched him in the face, sure, but it would have been worth a black eye to see the slack-jawed shock on that Minette asshole’s face.

What can he say, self-preservation has never been his strong point.

“Yeah, yeah, for sure,” he said, instead of doing any of that. “Weren’t you just about to give me your number? I’ll get you the details.”

It was hard, but he did actually manage not to flash a smug smile in Tommy Hillfiger’s quietly furious face.

*

He should have kissed her the next afternoon, when he got down to the basement classroom of Druyan Hall and she was already sitting there, leaning back in the most comfortable chair with her Doc Martens up on the table. The textbook spread across her lap was practically bigger than she was and she was meticulously taking notes. So meticulously, in fact, that he was able to stand in the doorway and watch her for almost a full minute.

“I can’t say I was expecting you to actually show up,” he said, when it became clear she wouldn’t be noticing him any time soon. His voice in the silent basement startled her so much she nearly fell out of the chair, but for such a tiny person she must have had an incredible amount of self-possession, because she recovered almost instantly.

“Hi, Mulder,” she said, shutting her textbook and moving her feet to sit properly in the chair. “Is this really a UFO club, or was Ethan just being an ass?”

“I guess that depends,” he answered, deciding to use his discarded opening line from yesterday. “Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?”

She pushed her textbook further away from her—buying time, he analyzed—and then leaned on the table toward him—communicating interest and engagement. Despite himself, he felt a first stirring of attraction to this woman. He was beginning to like her. He knew it was a little more than “beginning” to like when the next words out of her mouth didn’t immediately spoil his good mood.

“Logically, I would have to say no.”

“No?” he echoed, knowing she had more to say. He could see it in the depths of her eyes.

“No,” she repeated. Firmly. “Given the distances needed to travel from the far reaches of space, the energy requirements would exceed a spacecraft’s capabilities—”

“Conventional wisdom,” he interrupted. It was about what he expected but not what he was hoping for. Maybe she just needed the right push... “I have a newspaper story here about a girl in Oregon. She’s the fourth person in her graduation class to die under mysterious circumstances. Now, when convention and science offer us no answers, might we not finally turn to the fantastic as a plausibility?”

She raised one eyebrow, holding out her hand for the article, but did not look at it before answering. “The girl obviously died of _something_. If it was natural causes, it’s plausible that there was something missed in the post-mortem. If she was murdered, it’s plausible there was a sloppy investigation. What I find _fantastic_ is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there. You just have to know where to look.”

“Well then, don’t you think we should have a look?” he asked, tossing the rest of the folder onto the table and pulling up a chair. Her eyes lit up with the challenge. He was somehow not surprised when she pulled a steno-style notebook out of her messenger bag, flipping open to an empty page like a diligent student ready to take notes.

Together over the next few hours, they investigated the small collection of newspaper clippings and printouts Mulder had collected on the case of multiple mysterious deaths in Bellefleur, Oregon. They didn’t manage to reach a consensus by the time she had to leave for class (he still firmly believed aliens were involved, she kept repeating there were too many unknowns to come to such a wild conclusion) but he got to see what she looked like when she was excited about something. 

He was not immune to the way her pale Irish skin flooded with color and highlighted her freckles. God, was he ever not immune.

*

He should have kissed her three weeks later, when he woke up shaking from another nightmare and she was the first person he thought of when his heart rate calmed a bit. She answered the phone even though it was past one a.m., voice a groggy mix of concern and annoyance that softened to worry when she heard him half-stutter through an apology.

“Meet me outside in ten minutes, okay?”

She hung up before he could protest that she doesn’t need to get out of bed and it was stupid of him to even wake her—

so he pulled on a sweater and sneakers and was sitting outside his apartment on the porch steps, smoking a cigarette, when she pulled up. “Get in Mulder, we’re going UFO hunting,” she called through the rolled-down passenger window, and only drove away from his outstretched hand once before letting him open the door.

 _Don’t get too close_ , he told himself, knowing even then that it was futile.

She bummed a cigarette from him even though he could clearly see her half-crumpled pack sticking out of the breast pocket of her flannel shirt—payment for the late-night pickup, was how she’d framed it—and drove in silence for five minutes before he gave in and asked if they were actually going UFO hunting. His apartment was only barely off-campus but she’d taken them into a very residential area of the nearby town.

She snorted and said, “Sort of,” before falling silent again. It was another ten minutes and twelve turns away from anything even resembling a main road before she pulled into the parking lot of the local middle school.

“Area schoolchildren see Elvis in cafeteria mystery meat,” he quipped. “Local ghostbusters investigate.”

Scully rolled her eyes. “Shut up, Mulder. This isn’t our final destination.”

Intrigued, he got out of the car and looked around. All he could see was the school, a field, and some trees. A remark about being beamed up was on the tip of his tongue, but Scully just slung her messenger bag over her shoulder and set off across the field, toward the treeline there.

And—it wasn’t like he’d never trespassed anywhere before, but he hadn’t taken Scully as a casual lawbreaker. Perhaps his instincts weren’t as great as he’d thought, but he had the sense that she was just the most inscrutable person he’d ever met.

It made him want to know more.

“Did I ever mention I did my undergrad here, too?” Scully asked, offhandedly, almost as if she’d heard his thought.

“No, you didn’t.” He followed her down a mild slope to a footpath in the trees, which he could then see were not nearly as thick as they looked on the other side of the field. After only about thirty feet they emerged on the other side, and the sight waiting for them knocked his breath away.

They were at the top of a hill that slowly rolled down to the glassy edge of a long, narrow lake. With absolutely no lights in sight, the night sky dominated the scenery.

He could _see_ the _Milky Way_.

He looked down at Scully, and her grin was brighter than any of the stars in that sky. “Gorgeous, huh?”

He could only nod. “How did you find out about this place?”

“Dated a local the first few years of undergrad. She actually went to that middle school when she was a kid. She brought me here on our first date.” Scully grabbed his hand and tugged him in the direction of the playground. He let her drag him along, content just to be in a place this peaceful and picturesque with her.

They climbed the jungle gym and sat side-by-side at the top of a double slide while she packed a bowl and he watched her deft hands. Starlight highlighted her face and glinted off her piece—a little glass whale, mostly clear, with threads of red and yellow winding through it.

“What’s its name?” he asked, nodding toward it as she hands him the bowl along with a white lighter. Wordlessly he handed the lighter back and fished his own out of his pajama pants pocket.

She raised her eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“It’s unlucky.”

“No, I mean, you think I named my bowl?”

He shrugged, taking a hit through the whale’s tail and handing the bowl back to her. She pointedly did not accept his lighter along with it. While she was taking her hit, he finally exhaled, breath nearly invisible in the night air.

She shrugged then too. They finished the bowl in silence and she packed it back into her ever-present bag, then wiggled a little to lay back on the slide. For a minute he just stared.

“Why aren’t you sliding down?”

“Aliens,” she deadpanned, before giggling and ruining it, the cutest fucking sound he’d ever heard, and he got the absurd impulse to make a fool out of himself over and over to make her make that noise again. “Because science, Mulder. I’d explain the physics behind it but I brought you out here to look at our vast universe, not watch me talk.”

 _I’d watch you talk all night_ , he thought. He went to mimic her position and slipped down the slide, landing hard on his ass. He heard that infectious laugh from above him as she slid down to catch up. “Are you okay?”

He was already standing, rubbing the sore spot where he’d landed. “How come that didn’t work for me?”

Looking very entertained, she said, “You have to brace yourself with your feet.” For the second time that night she grabbed his hand, this time pulling him down the hill—just to the edge of the beach, where she laid down in the grass. He laid down beside her and the grass tickled his skin roughly. He sighed in contentment before he realized he was doing it, and she nudged his hand with hers but did not grab it again.

He looked up at the vast autumn sky and thought about the beach near them. How they were, in the grand scheme of things, as small and insignificant as any one of those grains of sand. And yet, he felt anything but small and insignificant with Scully beside him.

“I don’t get it, Scully. There’s so much out there. How could you believe we’re alone in the universe?”

“I never said that,” she said, and when he glanced over he saw her fingering the cross around her neck. He wondered if she even realized she was doing it. “But the sheer number of variables that have to be exactly right for life to evolve is... well, staggeringly improbable. It’s a miracle humanity ever reached this point, never mind did it five separate times in the history of Earth.”

“But not impossible,” he countered.

“No, not impossible,” she allowed. “But there are so many prohibitive factors. I’m not discounting the _remote_ possibility, but I need more to go on than just a possibility before I’m ready to believe in extraterrestrial life.”

He wanted to hold her hand, but instead he just hummed and fell silent. After a minute, he heard her light a cigarette. As before, she offered it to him, but it struck him as a much more intimate gesture than sharing a bowl even though he knew there was no real difference. He took it from her anyway.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked after they finished the cigarette. She sat up to field-strip the butt and tuck it in the pocket of her jeans, then turned to him. Under the dim light of the stars, she looked positively ethereal, with her huge eyes and luminous pale skin.

He had an entire argument with himself in the span of five seconds, and came to a decision. “When I was twelve years old,” he began, “my sister disappeared from her bed one night.”

*

He—okay, it would have been inappropriate to kiss her on the day of her father’s funeral, but he’d wanted to anyway. She’d showed up to class that morning even though Skinner and Mulder both had assumed she wouldn’t. Before class started, Mulder tried taking her aside. “Dana,” he said, using her first name for the first time since the day they met. She was having trouble meeting his eyes, so he placed a hand on her cheek. It covered almost the entire right half of her face. “You don’t need to be here.”

“Mulder, what on Earth did you do to your leg?”

He glanced down at his ace-bandage-wrapped ankle. “Something stupid,” he answered succinctly, not wanting to get into it just then. (She’d have been furious to know he’d gone ghostbusting without her.) “Why are you here?”

“You should have that elevated,” she said. “Did you go to the hospital?”

“Dammit Scully, stop it.” He could kiss her to shut her up, he thought, but he could feel Skinner’s eyes on them and a couple of early undergrads already had a literal front-row seat to this exchange, so maybe it wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had. In fact, he shifted a little to screen her from the students’ view.

She sniffled a little. “I need to keep busy. They have everything under control at home, and at—” she took a stabilizing breath. “And at the funeral home, it’s useless for me to be there.”

He wondered if that was true, how her mother felt about her absence, but he also understood the need to throw yourself into a project when the darkness encroached. He could not think of a single reason to convince her to go that she would listen to. And he trusted her enough to know that she knew her own best way to cope with this.

He kept a close eye on her during class, and after it was over thought of offering to accompany her home and possibly even to the funeral itself, but before he could offer—before he could make up his mind if she might want him there or not, even—she’d slipped out the door.

*

She came over without calling that night. Danny was home to let her in, but Mulder was quite sure that if his roommate hadn’t answered the door she’d have used the hidden spare key he’d told her about weeks ago. When she knocked softly on his bedroom door and then let herself in without waiting for a response, he wasn’t surprised, but he was glad. She’d come straight from the post-funeral service from the look of it, in a black dress and stockings. She immediately kicked off the plain, sensible pumps she was wearing and only then did it occur to him that he’d never actually seen her wearing anything other than her scuffed-up old Doc Martens. And then, without a word, she climbed up on the bed with him, where he was ‘convalescing’.

“Sure, Scully, invade my personal space,” he said. But he lifted the covers, too, so she could come closer if she wanted.

Evidently, she wanted, because she snuggled right up to him, closer than any living human had been in almost two years and it felt so natural he only questioned why he wasn’t questioning it.

“Shut up, Mulder,” she said, drowsy, clearly exhausted by the events of the day if the way her eyes were slipping shut was any indication. For a moment he watched her, almost envious of the newfound peace on her face until he realized that she’d chosen to come to him to find it. He couldn’t help himself, he reached over and brushed a stray lock of hair out of her face. She looked so young. It took him a moment to realize why.

“Where’s your lip ring?” he asked.

Bizarrely, she started to cry, covering her face with one hand and shifting, like she was trying to hide from him even as she curled closer into his chest.

“Hey, no, shh,” he said, and his free hand fluttered uncertainly around her face before he decided just to hug her closer to him. “Scully, Scully, Scully,” he repeated, not knowing what to say but wanting to fill the air with something other than her soft sobs. The urge to tell her it would all be okay welled up and he almost said the words, biting them back only because he remembered how furious they made him as a child, in those raw months just after Samantha’s disappearance. He thought he finally understood why everyone told him that even though it was clearly a lie.

Her tears soaked through his t-shirt. It was the second most helpless he’d ever felt in his life, and he hated it with an intensity that startled him. But then, as abruptly as it had started, her crying abated. She seemed to become aware all at once, and jerked like she was trying to rip herself out of his arms. He tightened them in reflex.

“Let me up,” she pleaded. “Come on, Mulder, don’t do this to me.”

With great reluctance and grave reservations, he allowed her to leave the safety of his arms. She took a deep breath and climbed out of the bed, wiping at her face with the fingers of one hand while she hunted down her shoes.

“Scully—”

She shook her head and avoided looking at him as she slipped one high heel on, then the other. “I’m so sorry,” she was saying, “I never should have come, I’m so sorry, I—”

“Got a cigarette?” he asked, and it stopped her dead.

“Uh, yeah,” she answered, looking around for her bag and finding only her keys, on his nightstand. “Wait. They’re out in the car.”

He shook his head. “Nevermind. Take pity on a poor cripple and get mine out of the desk drawer?”

Wordlessly she grabbed them and handed them over. He lit two and offered her one like she was the Bette Davis to his Paul goddamn Henreid, trying to ignore the agonizing indecision on her face. But in the end she took it, sitting carefully on the edge of his bed. 

It only took half a cigarette’s worth of silence before she spoke.

“I took out my lip ring because he hated it.”

He didn’t have to ask who she was talking about.

She shrugged one shoulder in a profoundly vulnerable gesture. “I guess it was dumb. He’s dead, right? He can’t—he wouldn’t know, it doesn’t matter anymore. But I took out my lip ring, and I wore those stupid shoes, and this stupid dress, and I—God, he’ll never know how sorry I am.”

It didn’t sound like any more information was forthcoming, so softly he prompted, “Sorry?”

When she finally met his unwavering gaze, the redness of her eyes killed him. “I was supposed to be a doctor, you know,” she says dully. “We had a plan. I had the grades for it, I thought I wanted it. He wanted it for me.”

“So what happened?” Mulder asked, shifting to prop himself up on one elbow. He was tempted to reach out and touch, but thought better of it.

She sniffled, not unlike that morning. “I realized almost the first day of med school it was all wrong, but I forced myself to finish the year before dropping out. Ahab was... apoplectic. I was unapologetic, and we both dug in our heels.” She grabbed his pack of cigarettes, lit another. “I’m sure you can fill in the details from there.”

He sure could. He knew her father was a captain in the Navy. He’d once heard her end a strained phone conversation with, “Good sailin’, Ahab.” But beyond that, he’d seen the way she interacted with Skinner. Saw how she recoiled from Ethan’s brash arrogance but continued to date him. But he wasn’t _quite_ as socially inept as Sherlock Holmes, so he knew this wasn’t an appropriate time to lay out those observations.

“Sounds to me like you got that stubborn streak from him.”

The wry half-smile on her face was such a welcome sight, he couldn’t look away. “You don’t know the half of it. It used to drive Mom crazy, she’d say it was like watching one person fight with themselves. And when we got along… it was special, you know? There was a bond there I don’t think he had with Missy and my brothers.”

He didn’t have anything to contribute here, no anecdote about him and his father—the less said about his family life post-Samantha, the better. All he could do was hum and squeeze her hand. 

And hope that was all she needed.

She only smoked about half of the cigarette before she stubbed it out in his makeshift ashtray, a decorative bowl his mother gave him. It was probably a family heirloom. Scully stood then, and for a moment Mulder thought she was going to leave until she reached behind her to yank the zipper of her dress down. When she eased it over her hips she must have hooked her thumbs into her tights because they peeled off too, until she was standing near his bed in just her panties and bra, both boring black cotton but somehow still able to make his throat dry.

Her torso was a mass of colors and lines. He hadn’t thought she even had one tattoo, let alone… three, four… five. Five tattoos. Mulder was aware that he was gaping, but didn’t know what else to do. Scully ignored him or didn’t notice, pulling his Knicks t-shirt out of his dresser and slipping it over her head. It came halfway down her thighs.

He almost wanted to die then. If it was the last thing he ever saw, he’d have passed on to next world content.

“Catching flies, Mulder,” she warned as she crawled back under the covers and immediately fit her body around his.

She was asleep in seconds.

*

He should have told her he cared for her as slightly more than a friend, when, during a futile effort to get thirty tests graded before the next class session, she threw paperclips at him until she had his attention and then asked, “How do you feel about platonic makeouts?” 

He raised both eyebrows. “Theoretically? Or are you referring to a more practical application?”

“The two of us. If I told you I wanted to make out with you right now, what would you say?”

Mulder didn’t choke on the air he was inhaling, but it was a near thing. Finally he answered, “I think I’d say ‘what about Ethan?’ ”

She stared at him in silence for so long, he was starting to think she’d found something wrong with his face (other than the obvious). “Mulder, Ethan and I broke up.”

“Why? He seemed like a nice guy.”

Her amused expression told him she saw right though him. “Because he was a douchebag.”

“When did this happen?”

“Ages ago, Mulder—a few months, probably.”

“So that would place the deed right around the time we met?” he asked innocently, but the innuendo hit his mark—he could tell by the way she glanced away for a moment.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I broke up with him the day we met.”

Mulder grinned. “Love at first sight, huh? Realized it would be cruel to lead him on when we were so obviously soulmates?”

She snorted. “Not quite.”

“Come on, Scully.”

“Ok, Mulder, it was his ‘spooky’ comment that did it. That crack about your UFO club.”

The mood changed on a dime as the smile dropped right off his face. “Scully, you didn’t—you didn’t have to do that. I’m a big boy, I can handle a mean nickname.” Why did he feel such plummeting guilt? He didn’t like Ethan. Scully deserved better.

“Don’t guilt yourself about it, Mulder. Remember, this was months ago. I didn’t even know you then. But it wasn’t the first time he was so blatantly rude to a stranger. If he’d say something like that to your face, what was he saying about me behind my back? I would never want to be with someone so cruel.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. It was a sensible reason—a Scully reason. He wasn’t going to tell her it was the right choice, because she already knew it was. And he wasn’t going to tell her why _he_ thought it was the right choice, because what she didn’t know had the potential of changing her mind about her earlier proposition.

(Scully, despite her brashness, had the biggest heart of anyone he’d ever known. She’d never lead him on.)

So while it was probably prudent to mention he wanted more from her, he also knew he could find a way to be satisfied with whatever she could give. “But you want to make out with me?” 

She glared. “Don’t fish for compliments. They’re not forthcoming.”

“Well, when you put it that way…” He slapped his thigh. “Hop on, Scully.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re great at setting the mood.”

“All of my many girlfriends say that regularly.”

Scully cracked a smile. Got up from her desk chair. And settled herself on his lap.

*

He should have told her he loved her the night he got them stuck in the forest overnight.

“Mulder, are you certain that this tip was credible?”

He shrugged. “They said they worked in the ER about two miles away.”

“Were you able to verify their employment? Did they give their name?”

He gave her a blank look. “No, they didn’t. It was on the internet, a forum, Scully—surely you’ve heard of stranger danger?”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, I have, which is why I question the wisdom of traipsing through unfamiliar woods hundreds of miles from home, just because a stranger on the internet said abductees were being returned here.”

“They didn’t say that. They merely noted that they worked in the ER, and in the past few weeks saw a dramatic uptick in people being brought in after being found in the woods here. These people were reporting missing time, they were disoriented, they couldn’t remember having ever been in this forest before. Why would this guy make that up?”

“Why not? For attention, for his own sick amusement, seeing if he can get a bunch of UFO freaks out chasing their tails in what could very well be a dangerous part of the woods. We don’t know anything about the local predators, dangerous topography, _anything_. And we just ran right in with our eyes closed.”

He just stood there, stunned. “Scully, I... I don’t know what to say. These woods are less than fifty miles from my parents’ summer house. I guess I just hoped...”

Her posture, which had been rigid in indignation, slumped and she sighed. “Mulder, I want to find your sister, too. But I don’t appreciate you saying ‘Oh, it’ll be a nice hike through the forest’ when that’s not the real intent! If I’d known, we could have prepared a little, I would have found a map, or we could have brought camping supplies. Now we’re lost and totally unprepared.”

“Scully...”

His words were halted by the hand she held up. “Let me finish. When you leave me in the dark about your real motives, it makes me feel like you don’t value me as a friend. Is that true, Mulder?”

The full weight of her question rested heavy on his conscience. “Scully, I—I never meant to make you feel like that. Your friendship is important—it’s the _most_ important thing to me. You keep me grounded, you make me a whole person...”

He felt that familiar pull, ever-present at moments of significance in their relationship, to kiss her. Like all the other times, he pushed it away until he realized—he _could_ kiss her now. When he went to pull her closer, she did not resist, and he took that as a cue that her anger had mostly blown away.

(Her temper was quick. A short fuse, followed by a small explosion. But always, then, forgiveness.)

They’d kissed before, of course. But there, in the middle of nowhere with his hand on her cheek, in the direct aftermath of an argument and a declaration that skirted the edge of showing his hand, that gentle press of their lips together felt so much greater than the sum of its parts. He was positive she felt it too. He knew in the way she came up on her tiptoes to wrap her arms around his neck. It made him smile into the kiss, and in response she broke away—the smile was, apparently, contagious.

She was so beautiful, a vision in a Waitresses t-shirt. He couldn’t stop looking at her, conscious that his every feeling could be found in the awe of his eyes. 

“What?” she asked.

He could have told her.

“Nothing. Come on, we better get going if we want to make it out of here before nightfall.”

She didn’t fight when he took her hand. It was good to be him.

“Mulder?” she asked, not looking at him as they navigated their way down a gradual slope in the path. Leaves crunched underfoot.

“Hmm?”

“I’m still angry with you. Don’t think you distracted me with your manly prowess or whatever.”

He smiled slightly. “Never, Scully.”

But angry though she was, they both fell silent as they continued their way back toward civilization, sunlight growing ever-dimmer around them. He’d seriously underestimated how quickly the sun set—or, perhaps, how quickly it became useless for hikers while it did. The distinction didn’t matter as much as the growing darkness did. Anxiety sped his pace, and quickly Scully was having to power-walk to keep up with him.

“Mulder, slow down,” she said, and—yep. There it was. She was still pissed.

He bit back a retort about her tiny legs holding them back, and instead decided to go the innuendo route. It would be a good litmus test for _precisely_ how pissed she was, too. “Want a piggyback ride, Scully?” He stopped and crouched a little, patting his shoulder. “Hop on.”

“Ha ha,” she grumbled, continuing past him. “You’ll be laughing out the other side of your face when I take you up on it.”

He didn’t think he would, but oh well. 

As he hurried to catch up with her, though, the inevitable tragedy struck. His right foot left the path, unexpectedly landed on top of a small rock, and his ankle rolled over the uneven terrain.

He bit off a curse word as he fell to the ground. Scully didn’t even turn around.

“Scully!”

When she looked back, her face paled slightly and she hurried over. “Mulder, are you ok?” Her hands fluttered around his face, not quite touching, and he liked it too much to remind her that the problem was with his ankle, not his head.

“Probably. Just… help me up?”

She raised an eyebrow, and he couldn’t blame her. Five-foot-nothing Dana Scully, pulling him up? But she did it, so he chose not to mention how she stumbled a little once he was upright. Plus, he was too busy trying to catch himself when his first experimental step revealed a more severe injury than he’d expected.

She saw his bobble and sighed, sitting down on a nearby fallen log and dragging her messenger bag onto her lap. “Come on, Mulder. Let me take a look at that.”

He tried to make his limp more like a swagger, but failed miserably judging by the ill-concealed smirk on her face. “Guess I won’t be winning any prizes for style,” he quipped as he eased himself back to the forest floor. Scully just gave him that inscrutable half-smile he liked so much, not responding other than to carefully bring his ankle up to rest on her bag. After pulling his laces open, she eased his hiking boot off. He’d say he didn’t hiss in pain, but the only living thing for miles around (he hoped) was Scully, so why bother?

“Stop it, you big baby.” She barely glanced up for a moment before redirecting her attention to his ankle, gently palpating the area around the bone. “You probably didn’t break it again.”

“Probably?”

She smirked. “Well, I did drop out of med school. I might be making this all up.”

He groaned theatrically and let his upper body drop to the ground while Scully slipped his leg off her lap and onto the log beside her. “In all seriousness, Mulder, it looks like a high ankle sprain. Not much we can do beyond rest and elevation. I wouldn’t recommend trying to walk out of the forest on it, not tonight.”

His head shot up. “Seriously? Can’t I just lean on you and we hobble our way out of here?”

“No.” She sighed and slid her butt down onto the ground beside him. She didn’t speak for a moment as she dug out her battered pack of cigarettes and lit one, taking a long, _long_ drag. “Like it or not, the best thing for us to do right now is stay put. If we tried to leave now, we’d move too slowly to make it out before dark and there’s a high likelihood of one of us sustaining another injury. Especially since we’re not sure how far away the car is.”

He laid back down again with a groan, knowing she was right but hating himself for putting them both in this position. “I want to apologize in advance for the holy terror I’m about to become, Scully. I’m hungry and I’ve never been good at being hurt.”

She grinned. “I’m _shocked_ to hear that.”

But before he could retort, she was rooting around inside her bag and tossing a protein bar in his general direction. It hit him in the chest with a satisfying whack.

Amused disbelief colored his face as he shook his head. “Thanks, Mary Poppins.”

“Med school dropout,” she reminded him. “I always have a snack with me.”

He was so lucky to have her, he thought. His newly-acknowledged love for her was a warm, tangible thing that curled around his ribcage and flooded his lungs. As he unwrapped the bar with more concentration than necessary he said, “This why you’re my ride-or-die, Scully,” but couldn’t stop himself from sneaking a peek at her, to see how she would react. 

“Please, I can’t stand all this sentiment,” she deadpanned, blowing a smoke ring in his face. But then she met his eyes, smiling through the smoke.

He should have told her he loved her then. But although it seemed the right time, it wasn’t—because how could he put that on her, then, when she was about to spend the night outdoors because of him?

“You could go back and get help,” he suggested. He didn’t want her to, but the point was that she _could_. 

“You could shut up,” she suggested pleasantly. “Do you have anything to wrap that ankle in?”

“My flannel shirt, maybe,” he said, “but then I won’t have a pillow for my delicate head.”

She snorted. “I’ll show you delicate,” she threatened vaguely, but after (very tightly) bandaging him up, she crawled over and manhandled him until he was cuddled up against her, head resting on her lap.

“I don’t wanna wrestle,” he joked, and even though he couldn’t see her he knew exactly which smile was on her face.

“Shh,” she said, petting his hair. It was slightly condescending but extremely comforting, and Mulder never pretended to have much dignity anyway.

“Scully, can you sing something?”

“Like a lullaby?” She sounded totally taken aback. “Absolutely not.”

“C’mon,” he wheedled in a very manly way. “Not like a lullaby. Just in case there’s wildlife out here, the noise will keep them away..”

She sighed. “Mulder, you may think you want me to sing, but you don’t. Trust me.”

“I’ll never ask anything of you ever again.”

She huffed out a laugh, but it had done the trick, just as he knew it would. “Jeremiah was a bullfrog,” she half-whispered tunelessly. “Was a good friend of mine.”

It was nowhere near bedtime—just barely sunset—but between the long day of hiking and the careful monotone of Scully’s singing voice, he found himself drifting toward sleep.

“If I were king of the world,” she sang, oblivious to his heavy eyelids. “Tell you just what I’d do. I’d throw away the bars and the cars and the wars, and make sweet love to you.”

He dozed off with a smile on his face. Joy to the world.

*

He should have told Scully her he loved her the day Phoebe made him walk through fire. The whole situation was classic Phoebe Green—she showed up uninvited to a club meeting and announced her presence by setting off the fire alarm in the basement and slamming the door behind her. Mulder was already halfway to a panic attack and grabbing at Scully’s arm when the sight of his fucking ex-girlfriend arrested his momentum completely.

“Don’t get up on my account,” she quipped, looking awfully tickled with herself. As usual.

The alarm stopped. Just the test, he realized belatedly—and Scully had caught on too, if the look of suppressed fury on her face was anything to go by.

Mulder sighed, knowing they were in for a runaround but still not sure how to stop it from playing out. He carefully ignored the small, small part of him that was actually glad to see Phoebe. The part of him that overrode his rational judgment and said, _maybe this time…._ “It’s an old friend.”

Phoebe preened, though he doubted it was for his benefit. “Aren’t you going to thank me?”

“Thank you?” Mulder asked flatly, hoping his utter contempt for her mind games came across in his voice. It probably didn’t, judging by how Phoebe pressed on with her charade.

“For saving your life.” She laughed then, a familiar sound that didn’t quite warm his heart the way it used to. In two quick strides she crossed the room, pressing her lips against his. In his peripheral vision Mulder saw Scully look at the ground. He didn’t need a reason not to engage, but there was the perfect one. He pulled away.

“What brings you down to the basement, Phoebe?”

“I came to extend a very special invitation to my old friend Mulder.”

“Oh?”

“There’s a party in the hill district tonight.”

“I’m not interested,” Mulder answered flatly, not particularly caring if it sounded rude. He figured a little rudeness might be the only thing that would get through to her.

“Oh come now Mulder, you don’t think I’d bring you an invitation like this without a little extra?”

Mulder sat back, resting on the desk behind him because he wasn’t sure how to turn her away. “I’m listening.”

“Well, I have it on good authority that the host’s younger brother was abducted when they were children.” 

On his tombstone they’ll write _Here lies Fox Mulder. Nice Guy, but What a Sucker._ He hesitated for a moment, trying to ignore Scully’s astonished gaze, before conceding. “I guess I’ll see you tonight.” His feelings were decidedly mixed—excitement about possible answers warring much more profoundly with dread.

“Excellent.” Phoebe smiled.

And Scully, wonderful Scully, responded to Phoebe’s passive-aggressive, “Oh, goodbye,” with raised eyebrows and the most condescending wiggle of her fingers that Mulder had ever witnessed.

Savage.

He approved.

He approved slightly less two minutes later, when Scully began packing up her books and notebooks into her ever-present messenger bag without saying much of anything at all.

“Where are you going?” he asked. “The meeting isn’t over yet.”

“I have to go, Mulder, so quorum’s gone. Besides, I thought you’d like the free time—it’s going to take a lot to get you presentable for your date.”

He ignored the insult and focused on the real problem. “Date? Phoebe? She and I were over a long time ago.”

Scully raised her eyebrow. “Does Phoebe know that?”

He didn’t have an immediate response to that, but Scully clearly took his lack of answer as another answer entirely. She nodded her head with a grim, tight-lipped smile and walked out.

He sighed and leaned back in his chair, not knowing what to do.

*

In the end, curiosity won. He finished throwing on a nice pair of jeans and non-wrinkled button-up just moments before Phoebe showed up on his doorstep wearing something tiny but drop-dead gorgeous.

He’d sent Scully the party details, hoping they could present a united front against Phoebe’s bullshit, but she wasn’t there—as far as he could tell—when they arrived. Still, even as Phoebe convinced him to dance with her, he kept an eye on the front door, unable to give up hope that Scully would still come.

“She’ll get bored, you know,” Phoebe whispered in his ear. Then, like he was dumb, she flicked her head in the general direction of the sliding doors to the balcony. Scully was slipping back into the house, stuffing her pack of cigarettes back into her bag, and—damn, she looked great. Her little black dress was almost as short as Phoebe’s but not as tight, hugging her curves without clinging. The spaghetti-strap bodice dipped low enough to reveal the edges of one of her tattoos. And the untorn fishnet stockings she had on made her legs, disappearing into her trademark Doc Martens, seem miles longer.

And then because Fox Mulder had the luck of an eighties teen movie, their eyes met over Phoebe’s shoulder for a deeply uncomfortable moment in which Scully forgot to smile.

Scully looked away first.

Mulder cleared his throat. “Bored like you did, you mean?” he asked, redirecting his attention to the girl in his arms—who had noticed his lapse of attention, and was not amused. She practically pouted at his remark.

“I thought we’d moved past that.”

He didn’t even know anymore, was the thing. He knew Phoebe had. Hell, she had been over it before it ended—wasn’t that the point? And when she was out of his life, he’d thought he was over it too.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m being rude. Here you are, trying to give me a heartfelt warning about how boring and unlovable I am, and I’m being ungrateful. Where are my manners?”

Phoebe stroked his cheek in a blatant manipulation tactic that felt wonderful. “It wasn’t all bad, was it?”

But it was bad much, much more than it was good, and no matter how nice her soft hand felt against his five o’clock shadow, the memory of the hell she’d put him through felt worse.

He caught her hand in his, rubbing his thumb against her palm before using the connection to push her gently away. “Whatever it was, it’s in the past.”

She pouted—“ _Mul_ der”—but he was already walking away.

“Thanks for the tip, Phoebe,” he said, and wasn’t sure if he meant the warning about Scully or the information about the host. He knew he didn’t care, though. He could see Scully’s bright hair just beyond the entrance to the kitchen, and it beckoned him like a siren. He wound through the other guests toward her, not even stopping to think about it. It was Scully, after all—surely she wouldn’t be angry? She’d come for him.

But the minute he came up behind her, putting a hand on her hip, she stiffened and pulled away. “Oh, Mulder, it’s you,” she said after looking up, but he was positive she knew it was him. He knew when she was around even if he couldn’t see her—surely she must be able to do the same. 

“Hey,” he said. 

She raised her eyebrows, taking a sip of the jungle juice in her solo cup. He felt strangely attacked when he realized it was the same look she’d given Phoebe earlier in the day. The one he’d been so proud to be on the other side of, a united front against all the terrible ex-girlfriends of the world. “Hey,” she answered back.

He was actually kind of impressed by the disdain dripping from just one word. Or he would have been, if it didn’t hurt so much.

“Have you had a chance to interview the host?” she asked.

“Don’t even know what he looks like.”

Wordlessly Scully pointed to a dark-haired, freckled woman wearing a flowing red hippie-style dress.

“I’ll leave you to it,” she said, and turned on her boot heel. He watched her down the rest of her drink in one go. And then he watched her go.

*

He almost told Scully he loved her the next day, when she showed up ten minutes late to their weekly crack-of-dawn library rendezvous to grade papers and make out. For the first time all semester, Scully hadn’t beat him there or contacted him to let him know she was running late. Mulder had realized the previous night that if he never made another move, another attempt to get closer, she never would either, but he hadn’t expected her to start pulling away from him like that.

All it did was serve to reinforce the idea that this really had gone on too long. 

He figured the moment he saw her face—carefully blank and as expressionless as he’d ever seen it—that there would be no making out today. Which was fair, but wouldn’t stop him from being annoyed about it.

“How was your night?” he asked as solicitously as he could manage.

“Fine,” she replied, in a truly neutral tone, as she surveyed the study room he’d chosen—barely more than a 2x5 table-height shelf built into the wall, two chairs, and a white board. He’d had his pick of rooms, since it was so early on a Saturday, including their usual room, which was three times as big, with glass walls and a table for four.

She didn’t comment on the change of venue but took him apart with a look instead, dropping her bag on the middle of the table in a pointed attempt to create a divide between them. Her denim jacket was armor she didn’t remove, not even when their room grew hot from lack of ventilation and too much body heat.

For almost an hour, they silently worked on a stack of lab reports, until Scully went to grab another off the stack and snorted at the sight of Mulder’s finished pile, almost half the size of hers.

“Hungover, Mulder?” she asked sweetly. “Not up to your usual standard, today.”

“Just tired,” he couldn’t stop himself from sniping back, because it was Scully’s goddamn fault he couldn’t concentrate. “Phoebe kept me up late.” As soon as the words left his mouth, though, he wanted to take them back. Scully’s face turned stony as he mentally cursed his spiteful, self-destructive streak. He sighed. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s not my business,” she bit out, keeping her eyes focused on the lab report before her, and maybe it’s not healthy or right, but her icy exterior always did bring out the hothead in him.

“Dammit, Scully!” he said, too loudly, as he slapped a hand down on the table. “I’m so sick of this. I’m tired of being held at an arm’s length. I’m tired of only being let in when you want someone to grope a little. I don’t want to _do_ this anymore.”

Her jaw dropped slightly but the naked hurt on her face left just as quickly as it came on as she called up a neutral expression.

“I see,” she said, but he caught her arm as she stood and began packing her bag to leave. Fearless Dana Scully, not afraid of anything—she was afraid of giving him the power to hurt her. But he already had it.

“No, I want—I want _more_ , Scully.” She stopped struggling, and he let her go. “I want us to be together, just us. I want you to feel like you can tell the Phoebes of the world to fuck off, because I’m taken.”

A smile twitched at her lips, but her eyes... for the first time since they met, he saw everything in them. “You just want me to fight off your ex-girlfriends for you.”

“Don’t you want to?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said, bending down to kiss him, and—well. Mulder knew that Skinner was going to chew them out on Monday for not finishing the lab reports, but it was pretty hard to care.

*

When he told her he loved her, it was a surprise to him too. Not the emotion, but the timing.

They were in Skinner’s office, covering his office hours. There was some kind of emergency at home—something with his wife, Skinner had muttered, and from the look on Scully’s face, Mulder wasn’t not the only one who had no idea Skinner was married. He didn’t even wear a ring.

And while, normally, Mulder would have taken this opportunity to snoop a little—open every single desk drawer, judge the books Skinner keeps on his shelves, and the like—he was a little distracted today.

Mostly because when he sat down in Skinner’s chair to begin said snooping, he ended up with a lapful of Dana Scully.

Mulder was an intelligent man. He knew when to alter his priorities to suit the situation at hand. So instead of invading his boss’s privacy, he’d cupped his hands at the back of Scully’s neck and pulled her closer, capturing her lips in a gentle kiss that she quickly turned into something a bit more passionate.

“Dr. Skinner, I’ll do _anything_ to improve my grade,” Scully purred, and Mulder recoiled a little out of an uncomfortable mix of terror and arousal.

“Gah! Scully, come on. _Not_ cool.”

She was so fucking amused with herself. (It was cute as hell, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.) “Sorry, Mulder, I couldn’t resist,” she said, but she was sliding her hands under his shirt and up his torso, so he didn’t pay much attention to the content of the apology.

Then before he knew it, she was pulling his shirt up and off, tossing it in the corner of the room. He opened his mouth to protest but thought better of that course of action when her shirt joined his. He decided right then and there he’d never tire of seeing Scully’s tattoos. He placed his hands on either side of her ribcage, skimming his thumbs along the ink found there.

Suddenly, she stopped dead. “Shh.”

Low-level panic flooded him like so much adrenaline, and his muscles locked for a moment. “What?” he whispered.

She didn’t answer for a minute—it looked like she was concentrating on listening hard, which worried him immeasurably. The last few brain cells not occupied with panicking were trying to figure out the quietest way to get her off his lap so they could retrieve their clothes. He never thought he’d _regret_ getting Dana Scully naked. 

“I think there’s someone out there,” she hissed. “I heard knocking.”

He just gaped at her as she let that statement hang in the air between them. He strained and strained, but could not hear anything as perhaps five gut-wrenching seconds passed.

Then she smirked.

“Gotcha.”

As soon as his brain parsed the meaning of all that, he sighed and slumped back into Skinner’s fairly comfortable desk chair. Scully looked tickled—scratch that, positively _gleeful_ —and while there was a part of him that thought this was the dirtiest, most cruel trick anyone’s played on him, most of him was transfixed by the sight of her face, so openly joyful that he couldn’t stop the words from bubbling out of his throat.

“Scully?”

She was still smiling. “Yeah?”

He could stop himself, he thought. Nothing had to change. But this was right.

“I love you.”


End file.
